Our resident movie critic Andy Oliver selflessly taken himself along to Colchester’s Odeon cinema to see Pixar’s 3D computer-animated sequel to Finding Nemo. Here are his thoughts.
Finding Nemo was a pretty great movie, from the emotionally devastating beginning to its uplifting and exciting finale; it was stuffed full of great characters; there were plenty of laughs and a few tears; oh, and it was beautiful to look at, really, really beautiful.
Dory, the big-hearted Blue Tang with short-term memory loss (voiced by Ellen DeGeneres) was a terrific sidekick, but the idea of basing a whole movie around her? I’m not afraid to say I was more than a little sceptical about the idea, I was worried she might just get a little, um, annoying.
Turns out, I was wrong (not for the first time). Dory is a terrific central character, full of warmth, heart and bravery, a fully realised, emotionally vibrant protagonist whose journey every bit as heart-warming and heart-breaking as any Pixar has offered up before.
It’s such a shame that Finding Dory falls apart in the second act when it moves from the open ocean to an aquarium.
When a memory is sparked by the migration of hundreds of stingrays, Dory sets off in search of her family only to fall into the hands of some well-meaning marine biologists, Marlin (Albert Brooks) and Nemo (Hayden Rolence) in pursuit. Dory ends up in an aquarium/fish hospital from which she enlists the aid of a cranky septopus (a seven limbed octopus wonderfully played by Ed O’Neill), a short sighted whale shark (Kaitlin Olsen) and an echo-locationally challenged Beluga whale (Ty Burrell).
Finding Dory begins with a series of flashbacks that lead up to Dory’s first head-on meeting with Marlin and then Finding Nemo happens. The opening scene itself is beautifully touching as Dory’s parents (Eugene Levy and Diane Keaton) try to teach her coping mechanisms for her short-term memory, parents of special needs children will no doubt recognise the small triumphs and the struggles portrayed here.
The problems begin to appear as Dory first remembers that the aquarium is the place she was raised and tries to get from one pool to the next and then the next and so on. Then she tries to escape, which basically involves trying to get from one pool to the next to the next. Meanwhile, Marlin and Nemo are trying to break into the aquarium which involves… well, you get the idea by now. It’s all a bit frantic and, as a consequence, character development suffers, especially for Destiny the whale shark and Bailey the beluga. There’s just too many set pieces and not enough story and by the time you get to a highway car chase (yes, really), it’s all a bit tiresome and exhausting.
It’s a shame because there’s a lot to enjoy and some great comic relief characters like two sea lions played by The Wire alumni, Idris Elba and Dominic West, and a seriously freaky-weird bird called Becky. Ed O’Neill is great as Hank, the escape obsessed septopus, snarky and broken-hearted by turns. A couple of old friends return, there’s cameos by the seagulls and Sigourney Weaver, but not enough of the sea otters (seriously, you can never have too much sea otter “Cuddle party” action).
Dory isn’t as funny as she was in Finding Nemo, but that’s okay, it allows DeGeneres the space to go deeper into the character and note-perfectly plays sad resignation and childish excitement.
Listen, Finding Dory isn’t a bad film, at times it’s really, really good and less demanding audiences won’t complain too much at its repetitive, hyper final two acts. The problem is that Pixar have set the bar so high with so much of their output that it’s really noticeable when they dip slightly under it.
Oh. And if nothing else Finding Dory is really, really beautiful to look at.
A few months ago we took a look at Colchestersoup, a simple idea with its origins in Detroit, USA. The Colchestersoup events have come a long way since those early days and Karen Taylor now brings us up to date.
Looking back, looking forwards
It’s well over a year now since Colchestersoup first opened the doors in Colchester at the Hythe community centre and it’s been an absolute rollercoaster of a year!
Back in January 2015 the soup concept was a new one to the UK with Colchester being the 3rd town to host soup evenings.
We constantly had to explain the concept… no it’s not a soup kitchen… and we still do. But that’s OK. Since then we’ve met up with the originator of Detroitsoup (who we nicked the idea from) after she was flown over by Richard Branson and have learned that after 6 years of Detroitsoup she still has to explain it to her own father.
But it’s a whole lot easier now. BBC world news visited us in Colchester town centre in March last year, wrote a stunning write up and soup exploded all over the country. Figuratively.
We’ve been in newspapers, on the radio, in magazines and blogs and visited other soups as far north as Newcastle- They had been trying to get funding for 2 years but nobody ‘got’ the concept. Until the BBC article.
Now there are more than 50 in the UK. We’ve had visitors to Colchester who have flown down from Scotland to see how it works, visitors from the Czech Republic and on no soup night is there a room full of entirely Colchester people – the last one included Lithuanians, Czech and Chelmsford people amongst others.
The idea is simple – we rent a room, provide some soup and invite 3 people to speak about their idea and what they would do with any money won. The 3 people will have already submitted forms telling us about their idea – that way we can select a varied group for the entertainment of the room. Visitors pay a donation at the door for soup and a vote, the money goes in a pot, 3 people speak, everybody has homemade soup and a roll while discussing who they are going to give their vote to. Votes are counted – highest votes takes all the money. On two occasions people have shared with joint top votes. The community in the room decide who gets the cash – not us, not a grant form, not a committee. People for people.
We like our numbers here at soup. After all there would be no point if we couldn’t measure the impact so a few statistics…
We’ve run 15 soup events over a period of 17 months. We’ve run 3 events for councillors where the councillors put their community grants in a pot, one for Essex County Council alongside Harwichsoup to show ECC how it could work, one for Colchester Voluntary Services, and the other 10 were ‘normal’ soups. At those events 60 people have stood up and talked about their ideas (there are more at councillor events- everybody that asks gets a turn) Of the 60, 4 were charities, 23 were other organisations, 24 were individuals with good ideas and 1 was a local business. The councillor pots accounted for £10,000 distributed across 23 different organisations. The remaining soups have ‘redistributed’ £3,130.68 from visitor pockets to pitcher pockets.
The pitchers have included such ideas as:
Fitting out a van to travel and educate people about autism – Individual Star ratings for restaurant and business doors showing accessibility – Individual Clay for free pottery lessons – Individual Potters wheel for special needs adults – Organisation not related to individual above Exoskeleton for badly damaged leg – Individual Funding for book publication – x2 – Individuals Korfball awareness – Individual – didn’t want to win just wanted to let people know it exists Minecraft overlaid with Camulodonum – Individual Grief Counselling – Individual Disability adjustments to houses – Charity
Some of those won, some didn’t but let’s use those as examples…
Fitting out a van – his 50th birthday – he raised awareness and gained extra donations outside of soup Star ratings – someone else in the room offered to create the website which the money was needed for – doubling it’s value – he won Pottery lessons – they won – someone else in the room gave them access to heavily discounted clay Potters wheel – they won – it’s probably spinning as you read Exoskeleton – this was the final amount of money needed for revolutionary health care usually only available to the forces – he won and is the first civilian in the UK with this intervention. He was due to have his leg amputated the following week. Funding for a book – one is published and has great reviews – the other – watch this space Korfball – didn’t win – someone else in the room offered an entire team of players Minecraft overlaid with Camulodonum – hopefully will be in all schools in Essex soon – he won but gave his money away to joint winners Foodbank Grief counselling – she won – needed money for office space but someone else in the room gave her the office space – free – money used for sourcebooks instead – doubling the value Disability adjustments – strong East of England charity – there to raise confidence of the presenters speaker skills – he’s come back from devastating injury – now a confident presenter
With numbers that good we should be really pleased to continue. To be honest it’s the stories at the bottom of the page that are our reason for being. Every time we go home we are buzzing with the new ideas that WILL happen in Colchester just because a group got together in a room for a few hours.
All we did was rent the hall and bring some soup along.
Find out more about soup HERE Or follow us on twitter @colchestersoup
And like us on Facebook www.facebook.com/Colchestersoup
Listen to soup in action courtesy of brilliant community person Adam Roxby Here.
Over the past couple of weeks some extraordinary images of Colchester have been appearing on social media. Combining both old and new photographs of the town local photographer Xav Marseille has been creating a collection of stunning images, each of which is an incredible fusion of the town as it was decades ago, and as it is now in the 21st century. He aptly has named this collection Then and Now.
If you would like to see more of these amazing photographs, along with Xav’s other work, pay a visit to his website www.about.me/xavmars and follow him on Twitter @XavMars.
In Xav’s own words:
As a Parisian who arrived in Colchester over two decades ago, this town has become part of the fabric of my life. I studied Art and Graphics in France, but photography has always been my real passion and in more recent years I have experimented with a range of editing techniques that has culminated in the production of a series of interesting artwork – some of which prompted a recent exhibition at the Mercury theatre which ran for over 8 weeks.
A recent discovery of some old photographs of Colchester inspired my latest project – which explores how Colchester has changed over the years. It’s been interesting to consider how the landscape of the town has changed and, using various editing techniques coupled with my own modern photographs, fuse the two images together. The results have been both striking and insightful. Part of the project has allowed me to go on a journey delving back into the past, where as a photographer, you suddenly realise that you are standing in the same spot as the photographer 40, 60 or even 80 years ago. The equipment and technology may have moved on, and the landscape may have changed but the desire to capture the essence of the town from that perfect angle remains the same. The project has gathered momentum with the help from locals who have submitted old photographs and suggested ways to incorporate the artwork (postcards, calendars, publishing a book) and generally encouraged me to produce more of the “Then and Now” fusions.
I would like to see the project develop into an exhibition at a local venue where people can perhaps experience the journey that I have taken during the artistic process and step back into the past with the images whist still enjoying what they capture about modern society.
Our resident movie critic Andy Oliver is fresh back from a trip to the Odeon to see Stephen Spielberg’s big screen production of Roald Dahl’s much loved children’s book The BFG. This is what he thought of it.
The sound of a falling bin in the dead of night usually alerts us to the midnight hunger of the neighbourhood cats or the occasional urban fox, but for young, insomniac orphan Sophie (Ruby Barnhill), there is something far, far larger that disturbs her wee small hours. A giant stalks the London night and, once seen, he has no choice but to kidnap the curious youngster for fear that she will reveal his existence to a world he secretly fills with dreams and wonder.
A relationship that begins with fear and suspicion blossoms into a warm and loving friendship, the giant and the little girl finding in each other that which they are both missing in their lonely existences. The Big Friendly Giant (Mark Rylance) lives in a world where he is bullied and threatened by bigger giants, he needs a friend as much as Sophie needs a family, they are two halves of one greater whole and, together, they are an unstoppable force for everything that is good and brave and decent. Together, the BFG and Sophie must figure out how to stop the larger, more vicious giants from eating children and how to live in a world where both are exceptionally sensitive to the pain of others.
As much as Sophie and the BFG are bound by their kindred spirits, so are Roald Dahl and Steven Spielberg: Two of the greatest storytellers ever to grace their respective, artistic fields. Dahl is one of the treasures, if not the crowning jewel of children’s literature and Spielberg the undisputed master of a cinema that speaks to the child in all of us. Forget Batman and Superman or The Avengers, this is the team-up to beat all team-ups.
Working from a script by the late Melissa Mathison (who wrote ET), based on the Dahl’s favourite of all his stories, Spielberg creates a vision that, although narratively slight, is a beautiful love letter to both writers and, also, a statement of his own body of work. The BFG takes Sophie to a magical realm where he harvests the dreams that flit around like technicolour fireflies, remixes them to his own recipe and distributes them to the world of slumbering human beans (sic). If that’s not metaphor for the work of the writers and of himself, then I don’t know what is. A lesser director might have mined their back catalogue for nods and winks, but Spielberg is way too savvy to use obvious (and over-used) Jurassic Park tumbler of water/approaching footsteps gags or overplaying the giants’ fear of going in the water.
The film is a mixture of live action and wildly inventive computer effects, the giants and their world standing just on the right side of cartoonish. The opening scene, a sweeping, descending shot of London at night and the production design (especially of the idealised architecture) both recall Mary Poppins, a live action/animated classic that also perfectly nailed this mix. The effects are seamless and carry you on a journey that enters through wide eyes and nourishes the soul, it is a landscape of wonders beautifully realised.
Mark Rylance, who brings the BFG to life through motion capture performance is wonderful. He delivers his Dahl-isms with a charming, and occasionally heart-breaking, bumpkin accent (“Use your titchy little figglers”) and slowly brings you into the head of a character that you initially distrust to that of someone suffering crushing loneliness and a desperate need to connect. Whilst in Ruby Barnhill, Spielberg has found another natural gem of a young actress, she’s sassy, tough, smart and caring as Sophie and has charisma to spare. The Flight of the Conchords’ Jermaine Clement is marvelously evil as the movie’s big bad, Fleshlumpeater and Penelope Wilton puts in a wonderfully understated performance as The Queen.
The BFG is squarely aimed at children but there’s much to enjoy for mums and dads too, though Spielberg doesn’t throw in any sideways winks of adult humour. There’s fun and scares and wonder and fart gags aplenty (three of the Queen’s corgis realising, in unison, that an explosive exhalation of bottom-gas is on its way is going to take a lot of topping in the laugh stakes this, or any, year). Yes, there’s a bit of a pacing issue (the film occasionally dips) but you’d have to be a World-class cynic not to enjoy anything The BFG throws at you. Unless it’s a Snozzcumber.
Pete Hope, co-founder of GO4 Enterprises who run the GO4 Market Café in Holy Trinity Church, Trinity Street, and Café on the Rec in Old Heath, tells Colchester 101 readers about himself, how he came to found the social enterprise, and the challenges they face.
I was born in 1952… I’ll let you do the maths, Al Martino, “Here is My Heart” topped the embryonic music charts, not that I can remember ever hearing it.
I guess I am very fortunate to have lived through the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and having a good go at enjoying the new millennium.
When I left school there was no such thing as a NEET (Not in Employment Education or Training). That was how you dressed for an interview.
Gay was a brightly coloured article.
I wasn’t a major success at school and obviously suffered from some form of juvenile amnesia as I often forgot to go.
Lack of qualifications didn’t hinder my progress into work, I learnt three good things at school – how to bunk off without getting caught, how to type and do shorthand – I told the school I had aspirations to be a journalist… the truth was a little different.
Wherever I worked I ended up typing and taking notes. Employers seemed to be surprised that I could type, and quickly, but also that I was a male who was able to touch type.
I often wonder how things would have panned out if I had learnt woodwork or metal work, but Lyndon Croney the love of my life, didn’t do woodwork or metalwork she did RSA Stage 1 typing and shorthand… it was a no brainer.
My first job was at Stratford Magistrates’ Court, where my typing skills were used daily. I moved out of the area for a while to take a better paid job in Dunstable Magistrates’ court.
After phaffing around I managed to get arrested for TWOC of a motor vehicle – it’s a long story – fortunately charges were dropped but I lost my job.
I applied for and joined the London Fire Brigade at 19 years old. I loved it and it was a
childhood dream to follow my dad as a firefighter. I served over 16 years, but incurred a due to service injury that pensioned me out of the Brigade.
The effect of that was quite devastating, a loss of income, identity, leading to boredom and dissatisfaction… I learnt then about the Black Dog of depression. It wasn’t a nice time, with three young children, large mortgage, and no qualifications, and having to fight the Home Office over pensions rights – which resulted in a precedent being set for future fire-fighters in my position.
The FBU were fantastic throughout this period supporting me even though I had left the service. Anyone who knocks Unions has no real knowledge of the depth of work they do.
Once I had recovered from the injury I got involved with voluntary work in the Probation Service, and ended up getting paid work supervising and managing offenders on Community Service (now called Community Payback).
It was during this time that I could see the real obstacles that young men with criminal records would have in obtaining work, and by now technology was replacing manual labour, reducing the amount of work available.
The Probation Service was starting to do less rehabilitation and was turning into a more punitive government organ, so I left.
That process has continued even more so, and the on-going privatisation of Prisons and Probation Service is proving very unsatisfactory.
I joined an organisation called Frontier Youth Trust and was invited to develop a youth work amongst young offenders. We concentrated on establishing a housing/mentoring project in Colchester called Out4Good, and this is still running.
However, we came back to the old chestnut of lack of employment opportunities for ex offenders, so I left that organisation to form GO4 Enterprises, this happening in 2010.
Myself and another founding Director started the Enterprise with a £100 investment.
GO4 is a Community Interest Company, a Social Enterprise with the aim of providing work/training/support for long term unemployed, ex-offenders, people with learning difficulties, and disabilities.
In 2010 One in Five young people were categorised as being Not in Employment, Education, or Training, so we broadened the remit from ex-offenders to any person out of work. My experience of being out of work through no fault of my own was a major spur in trying to do something positive benefitting both the community and individuals involved. My involvement with the criminal justice system, both as a Court Clerk, and then from the wrong side of the Dock, gave me a real understanding of what it was like to be on the wrong side of the law.
If I had gone to prison for the offences I had committed, my life would have taken a completely different direction.
I had a family who backed me and spoke up for me. Many young people don’t have that support.
In 2013, after three years of undertaking voluntary projects with a whole range of individuals, with little funding, we took over Holy Trinity Church and turned it into an indoor market and café.
We were also undertaking a gardening contract for a local housing association, and employing three ex-offenders supervised by a paid manager.
Our young people were now getting paid, and we saw a marked difference in their attitude and a subsequent drop in criminal activity, and one lad who is still with us overturned a crippling heroin addiction as well as shedding his tag as a Persistent Prolific Offender.
We face many challenges as we journey with our staff and small group of dedicated volunteers whose support is vital in maintaining our work
Currently we are assisting several young people with learning difficulties, helping them to get work ready, giving them training and work experience. We now work with people with physical and mental illnesses as well as entrenched unemployed whatever their age.
Our two main businesses are GO4 Market Café in Holy Trinity Church and Café on the Rec in Old Heath. We are engaged in a voluntary project on Jaywick.
The challenges of Holy Trinity Church are that it is cold and poorly lit.
It is owned by Colchester Borough Council and they have said they have no resources to improve the facilities.
We have a short lease and because of this have been unable to secure funding to improve the heating and lighting, but we feel a broader feasibility study should be undertaken by the council to ascertain what improvements can be made under the Church’s Grade 1 listing
We do not have the expertise or time to invest in a major fundraising bid on the building as this would distract us from the work we need to be doing with our staff/volunteers.
At the moment, because of a council staffing issue, we have been unable to meet with the CBC Estates team to discuss options and a way forward but unless we get a clear message from CBC it will be difficult for us to maintain or improve our position.
The “café on the rec” presents itself as a clear opportunity to train more people, but again without the support of volunteers to assist us in our aims this work could be hampered through lack of investment.
We have other out of borough opportunities presenting themselves and we will explore these in greater detail if momentum is lacking within CBC.
GO4 is governed by 5 Directors and we are all unpaid.
We have a share issue whereby staff can be involved, and independent investors.
We have 18 independent traders in the Market/Café, 6 staff on the payroll and 20 individuals on either work experience or volunteering.
So including the Directors there are nearly 40 people who have a stake in GO4.
The future is uncertain, much depends on whether we are able to draw in extra investment to branch out and concentrate on developing training in catering, with less emphasis on the market/café.
I would expect over the coming months that there will be some closures of small independent cafes as consumer confidence reduces. A nearby competitor has closed recently.
Our margins have been reduced because of increased operating costs, with a slackening of footfall, and we cannot pass increased costs onto our customers
There are plenty of coffee houses in Colchester, so as a company we need to always be considering what options we have to diversify and increase our capacity.
It’s been a busy summer at the town’s Odeon cinema for 101’s movie reviewer Andy Oliver who is freshly back with this review of the Ghostbusters remake for you.
It’s difficult to talk about the new Ghostbusters movie without first addressing the elephant in the room: that small but vocal group of misogynist internet dweebs who have taken it upon themselves to down-vote this movie on ratings sites; shout down anyone on social media who “dared” to defend the choice to switch the gender of the titular team; shout down anyone who rightly insisted that you cannot judge the quality of the film until you have seen it; they’ve even gone as far as to claim the original is an out and out horror movie with comedic elements and that turning it into an all-out comedy is somehow “Sacrilegious”, or that it is, in some bizarrely twisted-logic way, disrespectful to, and ruins, their childhoods.
Quite frankly, I have no time for these people or their hateful, whining rhetoric and empty threats. I’ve already had death threats on Twitter for not only defending the build up to this movie and accused of receiving cash for giving Batman vs. Superman a bad write-up (I wish). My response? The one that hurts them the most: I ignore them. They are the film fan equivalent of ISIS: hiding their identities behind false names and avatars; their hatred/ resentment of women in anything other than submissive roles; they want their “sacred” favourites to be the only ones that exist and think that their views are the only ones that should exist.
Now, for the sake of transparency I would just like to say that I in no way receive any payment or favours or special treatment for writing these reviews. I take every film I see on face value and never review a film without having seen it first. I try to give my honest opinion and am in no way biased in favour of any company. I just love movies and I love writing about them.
So, now that’s out of the way, the reason you’re reading this: Is Ghostbusters any good?
Actually, yeah, it’s pretty good. Not great, I’ll admit, but a perfectly good Summer movie that compares very favourably to the original. It’s funny in all the right places and scary in all the right places and makes for a very enjoyable evening at the cinema.
Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) is about to receive a tenure as a professor of physics at prestigious, if snooty, Columbia University, when she discovers that a book about ghosts she co-wrote twenty years earlier has been re-issued by her co-author and former childhood friend, Abby Bates (Melissa McCarthy).
Abby is still working on paranormal research and technology with Jillian Holtzmann at a rinky-dink college that has, quite frankly, forgotten they are still there. Erin goes to persuade her friend to withdraw the offending book from sale but finds herself helping Bates and Holtzmann in an investigation in to the sighting of a ghost at a New York mansion/tourist destination. A few gallons of ectoplasmic goo later and it’s “a-ghost hunting we will go” for the three women as the investigate and battle spooky goings-on around the city. They pick up more help along the way in the form of street savvy subway worker Patty (Leslie Jones) and thick-as-excrement receptionist Kevin (played with comedic excellence by Chris Hemsworth).
The veil between the living and the dead, it turns out, is being scratched away by angry nerd (ahem) Rowan North (Neil Casey) who wants to bring about the apocalypse in revenge for a life of being bullied and overlooked.
Ghostbusters works really well for maybe its first three-quarters and there’s plenty of great laugh-out-loud moments and a couple of genuinely scary moments. It’s in the climax that it falls a little flat, the laughs and scares kind of fall flat and it lacks somewhat in excitement drifting off into the generic. It’s okay but it never really has you sitting on the edge of your seat or falling off it with laughter, which is a shame because the journey getting there is so much fun.
There’s some really great comedy performances, Wiig and McKinnon are especially good and Leslie Jones nails all her moments. Melissa McCarthy plays a much more subdued, almost straight, role which, although she’s good, fans of her usual foul-mouthed mania might find a little disappointing. Chris Hemsworth is terrific as the good looking, but dim, Kevin and Andy Garcia makes a welcome and very funny appearance as the mayor. There’s cameos from virtually all the original cast, Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Ernie Hudson, even the late Harold Ramis is in there or, at least, his likeness is. Oh, and don’t worry, Slimer is in there too. The cameos are nice on the whole but nothing more, they add very little to the movie and an appearance by Ozzy Osbourne is downright embarrassing.
Those cameos are not the only things that hark back to the original, there are far too many nods and winks to it as well. These Easter-egg references, whilst entertaining enough for the more forgiving fans of the original, tend to hold Ghostbusters back from being its own film, they anchor it too closely and, as such, the remake never quite escapes the shadow of the Bill Murray et al classic.
Writer/director Paul Feig keeps the fun moving at a cracking pace but lacks the action credentials to hold the climactic battle together. Feig is a terrific comedy director and sets up a couple of truly unexpected jump-scares I just wish he’d got that third act nailed, then I might be watching a movie that really annoyed the Ghost Bros.
I hope Ghostbusters does well enough to demand a sequel, I enjoyed being in the company of this gang and look forward to an adventure unshackled from the chains of the original. It’s a movie made for a mainstream audience, not for a vociferous few who believe they are entitled to a movie just for them, it’s not a feminist movie as the Ghost Bros. would have you believe, it’s a movie where the main protagonists happen to be smart, brave and funny women.
OUR CLASSICAL MUSIC COLUMNIST LIZ LEATHERDALE, FOUNDER AND OWNER OF COLCHESTER CLASSICS, BRINGS YOU HER PICK OF JULY’S CLASSICAL MUSIC EVENTS IN, AND AROUND, COLCHESTER.
On Friday July 15 sees the first night of the 122nd season of the world’s greatest Classical Music festival, the BBC Proms, offering opportunities to explore Classical Music through the BBC Proms with a diverse season of live concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, on BBC TV and BBC Radio 3.
The BBC One Show, Tuesday 12 July at 7pm, should broadcast a film with Gyles Brandreth interviewing Patrick McCarthy, a local musician about how he saved Andre Previn’s live televised performance Orff’s Carmina Burana at the BBC Proms in 1974.
Last month we were treated to many Music Festivals in our musically rich region. This month the Roman River Summer Festival and more is happening! Feast your ears and eyes on festivals and concerts in our musically rich region.
Colchester’s Roman River Festival recently published its main brochure detailing events, talks, walks and, of course, concerts for the main Festival (16 September – 2 October) which will feature world-renowned musicians including Nicola Benedetti. In addition to the Autumn concert series, there is also a mini-festival (8 – 10 July) with musicians Tom Poster, Elena Urioste, Orlando Jopling and others in informal concerts in Mistley, Wivenhoe and East Mersea. Box Office (07759 934860) for further information on all events for both festivals
Saturday evening (9 July) Chris Phelps will be conducting the Colchester Symphony Orchestra in an all-Russian programme including Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No.3 with young soloist, Erdem Misirlioglu, piano category winner of the 2008 BBC Young Musician of the Year. The Third Concerto is often over-shadowed by No.2 , but received greater recognition when featured in the Oscar-winning film, Shine. The movie told the true story of the Australian concert pianist David Helfgott, who suffered a mental breakdown and abandoned his career for many years. Saturday July 9 at 7.30pm in St Botolph’s Church, Colchester . (Both the second and third concertos were heard in the same venue performed by international pianists Noriko Ogawa and Philip Smith at St Botolph’s Music Society’s 50th Anniversary Gala concert)
Tickets. £14 (01206 271128)
On Sunday 10 July Chris Phelps will be guiding The Kelvedon Singers through arrangements of well-known English songs in the beautiful setting of The Coach House at Marks Hall Gardens. The evening includes a glass of wine, canapés and complimentary access to the Gardens and Arboretum in Coggeshall.
Tickets: £15 (01376 563796)
Also on Saturday evening at 7.30pm James Davy, Organist & Master of the Choristers at Chelmsford Cathedral and conductor of The Chelmsford Singers, presents an organ recital at St Peter-ad-Vincula, Coggeshall.
Tickets: £7.50 on the door
The final concert in the current season at Studio Music at Brightlingsea begins at 3pm on Sunday 10 July with Trio Goya presenting chamber works by Haydn.
The East Anglian Single Reed Choir, an ensemble of clarinets and saxophones, presents its summer concert including music by Holst and Rimsky Korsakov on Sunday July 10 at 6pm, St Mary’s Church, Little Bromley. Tickets on the door by donation.
Tickets: 07425 1450222 or www.harwichfestival.co.uk
If you have a forthcoming concert of classical music, you would like previewed, contact Liz Leatherdale on 0800 999 6994.
Start your love affair with Classical Music at www.colchesterclassics.co.uk and take a minute to watch their company video:
The 10th anniversary celebrations of Wellies-On Community Interest Company and Colchester Classics will be held on the 22nd of July at Wivenhoe House Hotel with a Wellies & Black Tie Ball.
In order to ensure the success of this key fundraising event, we are seeking contributions to help defray the costs associated with the event so that all funds raised can go directly to the community.
It’s only with support from generous donators such as yourselves that we are able to continue to provide local individuals and families in need with innovative intervention, therapeutic services and education.
We hope that we can count on your support, enabling us in our work to build confidence and improve skills within the people that attend Wellies-On Care Farm.
Our service helps individuals to see their inner strengths, giving them skills and resilience to help them to cope with the things with which they struggle.
We will, of course, make it known from where the prizes for the silent auction and sponsorship have been donated with plenty of media opportunities, thereby also raising the profile of your company locally.
This year Colchester Classics are celebrating 10 years as a multi-award-winning Classical Music CD service to clever collectors and also those starting their love affair with music. Additionally, they offer CDs at concerts, festivals and rehearsals and preview and review concerts in Essex Life, Essex County Standard and Colchester Gazette. Not only are they helping us to celebrate with some fantastic music but they are also providing a huge amount of support to make the evening a success.
Why not treat yourself and your team to this glamorous night out whilst helping a worthy cause? You can request booking information and sponsorship opportunities from admin@wellieson.com
I hope very much to hear from you, and that you will be able to help to support us and our event.
When Colchester 101 asked for a review of The Legend of Tarzan our resident movie critic Andy Oliver swung into action.
Tarzan is a character out-of-time. In a post-colonial world, the “Slayer of beasts and many black men” is an anachronism, a throw-back, a hero for then and not for now. As much as I loved the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs as a child, it was always difficult not to notice the underlying racism and misogyny that pinned them firmly to the era they were written in: the natives were invariably cannibalistic, mean and destroyers of the nature that surrounded them; women were either damsels or riches/power-hungry manipulators of men.
So how does a film-maker approach Tarzan in the twenty-first century? Very carefully, it would seem. And it is that very carefulness that is at the centre why The Legend of Tarzan does not work as a piece of entertainment, though, unfortunately, it’s not its only failing.
Set some years after Tarzan (Alexander Skarsgård) has returned from his jungle upbringing to claim his hereditary title of Lord Greystoke, the film begins with a character still uncomfortable with his gentrification and his wife, Jane (Margot Robbie) still uncomfortable with the constraints of society and city life after her childhood of freedom in the Congo. It is with little persuasion that the Greystokes return to Africa, initially to investigate British access to The Congo and subsequently to investigate claims that King Leopold of Belgium is building his empire on blood and toil of slaves. This second reason to return arrives in the form of George Washington Williams (Samuel L. Jackson) before you can say, “British Colonial crimes against humanity”!
Once back in Africa, Skarsgård (and the film) can’t wait to get his shirt off and start swinging, swimming and running about with his old jungle chums: apes, lions and simple, jolly natives. Conflict comes in the shape of Belgian emissary, Leon Rom (Christolph Waltz doing his usual, kooky bad-guy turn) who has some convoluted plan to hand over the lord of apes to his mortal enemy, Mbonga (played with super-baddie charisma by Djimon Hounsou). The story of Mbonga’s enmity is told in flashback which also charts Tarzan’s already well recorded origin.
Director David Yates, who directed the fun (but increasingly dark) last few episodes of the Harry Potter franchise, struggles to maintain any pace and interest in a movie that looks increasingly like it was written by committee (inasmuch as that old joke about “a camel is a horse designed by a committee”). There are moments where, tonally, the movie is all over the place and Jackson (despite giving his best with a more than clunky script) sometimes seems little more than the movie’s “Get out of jail free” card (an intelligent black character, based upon a real person, whose expositionary speeches about fighting in the American Civil War and killing Native Americans are supposed to remind viewers of America’s own patchy record of human rights, but in reality feel flat and simperingly apologetic).
The action, when it comes, is efficiently filmed and never feels like it packs any punch, for example Tarzan battles a gorilla, but the confrontation lacks excitement and edge-of-the-seat thrills, yes it’s noisy but it’s all a bit, “Yeah. So that just happened”. The stunt work is under-realised and the computer generated animals never look anything but computer generated. Judging The Legend of Tarzan’s effects against this year’s other child-in-the-jungle movie, Disney’s The Jungle Book, is like judging a meal at The Ivy against a micro-wave dinner for one: it fills a hole but it won’t impress your friends when you tell them about it. Having said that, the climactic stampede is pretty good, but it’s a case of too little, too late.
The cast do their best but they are shackled by a script that is never quite sure what it wants to be: too comic-booky to be Hugh Hudson’s Greystoke, too earnest to be a Jonny Weismuller action/fun-fest. Belgium’s legacy of horrors in West-Africa sit uneasily within an action movie framework and add little to the overall tone, a return to the source material might’ve provided a more fun, if problematic, experience. Like The Lone Ranger before him, Tarzan feels like a character who has had his day and now seems like as good a time to retire him and hand the vines to new heroes as any.
There’s little to recommend about The Legend of Tarzan unless you’re a fan of male abdomens, if you are you’ll probably love it, for the rest of us though it’s an ill-fitting wig that daren’t move too fast lest it fly up and reveal what lies beneath.
No sooner had 101’s movie reviewer Andy Oliver submitted his review of Warcraft: The Beginning then his was straight back to the town’s Odeon cinema to watch The Nice Guys for you.
Nobody does action, character and snappy, laugh out loud dialogue quite like writer/director Shane Black. His scripts are sharp, cynical, often brutal, often prone to misanthropy, always quotable and always hugely enjoyable. His characters are damaged, fast-talking and, more often than not, absolute scumbags. Black made his name as writer of the classic Mel Gibson action vehicle, Lethal Weapon and, along with all three sequels went on to script The Last Boy Scout, The Long Kiss Goodnight and The Monster Squad before graduating onto the rather excellent Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Iron Man 3 as writer/director. The Nice Guys might not be a revolutionary departure from Black’s previous work, or bring anything sparklingly inventive or new to the screen, but it’s difficult to care when you’re presented with something this damned enjoyable.
Set in an asphyxiated 1970’s Los Angeles and revolving around a labyrinthine plot that wouldn’t seem out of place in an Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen novel, The Nice Guys is a call-back to a time we still had buddy movies, a time before Hollywood invented “Bromance”. Private investigator Holland March (Ryan Gosling) is a terrible person, he swindles old ladies and drinks so much that he has to have his 12-year old daughter drive him around town. When he accepts a case to find a missing girl it brings him into contact with Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe), a big hearted barrel of a man who makes his point with his fists and breaks limbs the way most of us break sweat: with little conscious effort. The problem is that Healy is in the business of helping the girl stay missing.
But when Healy decides that the girl shouldn’t remain hidden he teams up with March and his daughter, Holly (Angourie Rice) to discover why a porno film made by high-school environmentalists is so important to Detroit car manufacturers, and why so many bodies are dropping around them and bullets flying in their general direction.
Gosling and Crowe work amazingly well together and – this is going to sound a little weird, I admit – there’s more than a touch of Abbott and Costello about their double act: Crowe in charge and constantly exasperated, Gosling as the fall guy who’s never quite sure what’s going on. I can honestly say that I have never enjoyed the two of them as much I did here, Crowe’s earnest, lumbering resoluteness is stripped away and he’s (almost) likeable as Healy and Gosling delivers a whole truckload of goofy, manic charm in lieu of his usual brooding seriousness. Healy and March are riffs on the classic pulp noir anti-heroes of post-war “Men’s” novels, damaged individuals who might just stumble upon redemption even though they were never looking for it; amoral idiots who get a taste of doing the right thing and it doesn’t taste as bad as they thought it would.
So it is left to Angourie Rice as 12-year old world-weary Holly to be the moral centre of the movie. Like a Nancy Drew who grew up too fast, Holly sneaks into porn parties and confronts hitmen, she is the hero her father probably once dreamt he would be and the character Healy knows he possibly could be if he wanted to. Rice is great. No, not great, Rice is really, really great. Gosling and Crowe are bringing their A-game to The Nice Guys, Rice is absolutely knocking it out of the park.
Crowe’s LA Confidential co-star Kim Basinger turns up as the missing girl’s mother and Matt Bomer plays the big bad in typical Shane Black style (think Gary Busey in Lethal Weapon), full of barely restrained megalomania and psychopathy. They’re both great but, let’s be honest, they’re most definitely not the reason you’re watching this movie.
There’s a couple of scenes that hang around a touch too long and a dream sequence featuring a talking bee that could easily have been trimmed out, but on the whole it does exactly what it sets out to do and that is to entertain. It’s sleazy, amoral, hilarious and moves at such a cracking pace that you really don’t care that the plot seems to make little sense or even work. The Nice Guys is a great night out at the cinema and a movie that I’ll enjoy returning to again and again, you probably will as well.
